ETH Zurich turns an off-the-shelf robot hand into a robot that walks on its fingertips
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab describe in an arXiv preprint (2609.17172) a commercial Wuji Technology robot hand fitted with an 80-gram backpack holding a battery, an IMU and a Raspberry Pi Zero, which crawls on its fingertips with no arm attached, IEEE Spectrum reported on Oct 8. The controller was trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, using virtual springs to hold a crawling posture; the hand walked on 14 surfaces at about 9 cm per second, turned both ways, righted itself in 21 of 25 trials and pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away in 15 consecutive trials. Lead author Amirhossein Kazemipour is a Ph.D. candidate in the lab. The work is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.
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